A Very Zombie Christmas
by Rurouni Puppy
Summary: Christmas Eve finds our heroes hiking through suburbia toward a sporting goods store at a shopping mall. Too bad there are hundreds of zombies between them and the gun of Francis's dreams!
1. Chapter 1: The Suburbs

**A Very Zombie Christmas: A Left 4 Dead Christmas Story**

**Disclaimer: **I don't own any of the characters or zombies. They all belong to Valve. I'm definitely not making any money off of this story!

**Chapter 1: The Suburbs**

"Alright, let's get in and get out quick," Bill's gruff voice said. He'd just broken the front window of an abandoned house. Almost all of the houses in this neighborhood were abandoned. None of them had been built with sturdy defenses in mind. Bill used the butt of his rifle to scrape loose remaining shards of glass so that the rest of the group could get through. His left knee, long healed after being punctured by shrapnel in Vietnam, popped audibly as he climbed through the window and into the darkened house. Bill looked around the living room into which he had just climbed and wrinkled his nose at the smell of decay, and at the sight of little toy cars strewn across the bloodstained carpet. "There may be kids," he added grimly. He tapped ash from his cigarette and onto the carpet. The residents wouldn't mind.

"Aw, great," Louis groaned, joining Bill in the living room as Zoey and Francis watched his back, his shotgun at the ready. His black dress shoes crushed one of the toy cars with a crunch. "I can't believe we volunteered for this."

"_Zoey _volunteered us. There wasn't any '_we_' about it," Francis clarified as he climbed through the window himself.

Zoey was right behind him. She whirled to point both of her pistols at the empty suburban street as soon as she was through. Earlier, a former housewife had come shrieking around the corner of another house and surprised her. She was jumpy. "It was only fair," she said, tossing her head to get wisps of her long brown hair out of her face. "We used up all of their antiseptic spray. And you drank their last beer, Francis."

"Well, they offered," Francis replied with a shrug. Two days ago the four survivors had been traveling through the suburbs when they ran into the kind of zombie (they'd given up calling them infected – these things weren't sick, they were dead and hungry) that survivors had taken to calling a tank. A man showed up with a gas can and a lever-action rifle to help the small group take the creature down, and afterwards allowed them to patch up in his hideout. He, his wife, and his little daughter were still hiding out in their neighbor's basement, a month after the outbreak and two weeks after the neighbors became victims of the horde. The man had indeed offered Francis his last beer.

Francis's head snapped around as the angry babbling of a roused zombie echoed through the darkened, lifeless house. Bill stepped away from the door to a hallway on the right as Francis's shotgun boomed, catching a gray-skinned, screaming zombie directly in the face. By the shape of the torso that fell bleeding to the floor at their feet, the creature had been a man in his late thirties, in jeans and a black t-shirt. Francis stepped over the body and into the hall, firing another blast of the shotgun at a zombie who had been standing in the middle of the hallway, staring vacantly into the kitchen. "Let's find some medicine cabinets," Francis growled.

Francis and Bill made their way down the hall to the bedrooms while Zoey filled a backpack with usable foodstuff from the kitchen, and Louis shot two zombies in the postage-stamp-sized backyard through the kitchen window. He didn't bother to open it first, and broken glass clanked in the kitchen sink. His head rang from the sound of the gun's report in such a small space, but the survivors were getting used to that (or, more likely from Louis's perspective, were slowly losing their hearing).

Louis, for his part, still couldn't get over the way the living dead wandered absolutely everywhere. Once they'd eaten everybody they could get their overgrown fingernails on, the dead drifted aimlessly wherever they found themselves. Sometimes they would drift as far as a few hundred feet, putting themselves in the middle of the road, or face first against a fence, or behind a shower curtain in a bathtub (Louis hated that). There they would stand, or sit, or mill around on shuffling feet, until they heard something interesting. Louis thought they looked sad, sometimes, but he suspected he was imagining that.

Zoey thought that the zombies could smell as well as hear and see. The longer you stayed in one place, the more zombies would find their way to you. That was why most survivors kept moving, and why the group was surprised to find the family in the basement. Just trying to get a night's sleep tended to be an adventure. The evolved zombies seemed especially talented at locating living, breathing humans, so although the belching sound of a nearby boomer didn't cease to alarm the survivors, it had more or less ceased to surprise them. "Boomer!" Louis announced, for Zoey's benefit.

Zoey dropped a bottle of Flintstones vitamins into her backpack and zipped it, then cautiously poked her head out of the kitchen while Louis kept his gun muzzle trained on the back yard. The enormously obese zombie, with several curlers still lodged in its frazzled hair, was waddling toward the living room window that the four survivors had climbed through moments took a knee, lined her shot up carefully, and squeezed both triggers on her pistols. Outside, the boomer exploded in a cloud of blood, spattering the window frame and lawn with gore. She glanced over her shoulder toward the bedrooms when she heard a slamming door.

"God damn it," Francis snarled, backing away from the door to a nursery. On the other side, a shrill voice was shrieking and tiny fingernails scratched at the door like an animal trying to escape. The sound of scampering feet and a high-pitched growl made him turn around quickly, raising his gun. Bill was faster, firing three shots into the little oncoming zombie before it had a chance to sink its teeth intoFrancis's leg. The boy had been wearing a blue sweater with a firetruck on it when he died, and he couldn't have been older than six. The zombie was missing most of its right arm.

Francis poked the corpse with a booted foot. "I hate kids." Bill, his bearded face lit by his glowing cigarette, chuckled and collected a few more bottles of pills from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom before following Francis down the hallway.

Francis carefully dismantled the smoke detector in the hallway, pocketing the speaker and some of the electronics. The other dead child's shrill voice faded as the group headed back toward the window exit to the street.

By unanimous agreement, the group of four decided to spend only one more night with the family in the basement before moving on again. They were heading north, to Toronto. They'd heard that the zombies don't move well in cold weather, and that there was a decent perimeter in place with hundreds of people living inside. Bill and Francis had argued for spending the winter somewhere warm, butZoey and Louis had pointed out that nobody they had spoken to and none of the messages no the walls mentioned a single defendable location south of Tennessee (with the exception of a few places in Texas).

Their next stop on the journey was a shopping mall near the suburban neighborhood, for supplies to take north. The long streaks between civilization was less hazardous due to the lower population of zombies, but between the dropping temperatures and the limits to the amount of food and water the four could carry, that route held its own hazards.

Not long after sunrise, the four were walking through the labyrinth of the neighborhood, picking off the zombies that still lurked within from the road. Tightly packed neighborhoods, they'd found, were full of zombies. Where did people go when they were sick? Home, to bed or to the couch in front of the TV. Except that in a day or two they died there, and in less time than that (only an hour or so now, the rumors on the walls warned) they were up again, shuffling around their homes, munching on the families who had just been feeding them chicken soup and prayers not long before.

"It was Thanksgiving that really did us in," Bill commented, shooting a zombie who had caught site of them and come barreling out from behind a neatly parked SUV. The thing sprawled back over the hood of the vehicle, dark blood running over the blue metal.

"What? Why?" Francis said, his eyes on the empty homes rather than looking at Bill when he talked. The survivors were used to this behavior now. They all did it themselves.

"It was all of the travel, right?" Louis said. At Thanksgiving, the roads weren't clogged with empty cars and the army hadn't bombed the airports yet, even though everybody knew something was horribly wrong. Humanity attempted to maintain normalcy right to the last minute. "Everybody who hadn't already gotten sick met someone who had."

"Basically," Bill agreed. "Reloading," he added, crouching on his heels to transfer ammunition from one of his packs to his stood behind him, pistols ready, to catch any wanderers from the front.

They started walking again, each person watching a different angle of approach for hungry undead. Louis was in the back, checking over his shoulder frequently to check for hunters. "Hey guys, do you know that tomorrow is Christmas?" He asked the others after another check of the empty street.

"What? That can't be right," said Zoey, looking back from her wary contemplation of a house on their right. That one's door and windows were boarded up, though. If anyone had died there, they were probably still stuck inside. Zombies reacted to closed doors like part of the wall, unless they knew you were on the other side.

Louis pulled a small calendar out of his pocket. It was an advertising vehicle for some realtor, but there was room for dates among of the realtor's contact information. Louis had been marking off days since mid November, and displayed the page that showed most of December's dates crossed off too. "I'm serious," he said. "Happy Christmas eve."

"God… it's been that long?" Zoey said, staring at the calendar. She felt like it was just last week that she'd just said goodbye to her roommate when the other girl left for Thanksgiving break. Zoey's parents had told her to stay at school, because travel was becoming dangerous. Getting out of her dorm after the outbreak hit there was a nightmare she'd probably have for the rest of her life.

"It's not getting any better while we stand here," Bill warned them. He led the way down the empty street again. "That's the gas station they told us about up there."

* * *

**Author**'**s Notes: **Hi all! I'm writing this story as a celebration of the season (I'm agnostic and too lazy to put up lights) and because I always make up elaborate backstories for the briefly defined characters in action games. I'm really new to fanfiction publishing, so please let me know what you think!


	2. Chapter 2: The Parking Lot

**Chapter 2: The Parking Lot**

The group stopped briefly at the gas station so that Bill could get a few packs of cigarettes and to test the plumbing (it worked, they discovered after finding a bathroom key on the remains of an employee), and moved on when they saw the broken windows and empty shelves. The family in the basement had probably been gathering food from the gas station for the past month.

At the corner, the survivors turned west and walked for an hour, by their estimation. Francis amused himself switching weapons with Louis and waiting to shoot zombies until there were two lined up so that he could blast them both at once, much to the annoyance of his traveling companions. "Give me the damn shotgun," Louis finally demanded.

"Fine," Francis said, handing off the shotgun and accepting his well worn submachine gun from Louis. "Nobody can shoot Anna but me anyway,"

Zoey glanced over at Francis with an eyebrow raised. "Who?"

"Anna," Francis said again, shaking his automatic gently. "Stubborn old bitch, but she's been with me since the beginning of all this shit. It's about time to put her down though. Hopefully there's a replacement in that mall we're heading to."

"You could have said something about that," Said Louis, eying the weapon as he might a sloppily constructed pipe bomb.

Francis shrugged, cradling the gun in the crook of his tattooed arm. "You'd have found out anyway. She hits like a bitch too, you know."

"This way," Bill interrupted them, pointed at a sign directing shoppers to a Westfield shopping plaza. The four walked down the new road in silence punctuated by gunfire as they shot zombies who got too close. A few moments later they stopped and stared out over a wide sea of cars abandoned by determined, and doubtless infected,pre-holiday shoppers.

Parking lots were dangerous places. Any of the cars could be armed with zombie-attracting alarms. Some of the vehicles weren't even in park, and could unexpectedly roll over people or into other cars at the slightest push. There was always at least one car with a zombie stuck inside, waiting to break through the windshield with an unintelligible scream and run at you, and there were always more hidden in between the cars that could see you before you saw them.

This parking lot was crawling with the undead. Their heads, some missing hair and pieces of scalps, bobbed among the parked cars like the lost, exhausted shoppers they once were. One sat in the middle of the aisle the group started down, and Bill popped its head with a shot from his sidearm. He was worried about his diminishing pocketful of rifle ammunition. The alarm on the car to his left chirped twice and blinked its headlights in warning. Bill winced and walked to one of the older vehicles, a beat up pickup truck.

He pulled some plastic tubing from his jacket pocket, and Zoey dug a couple of empty bottles from her navy blue backpack. She'd picked it up in one of the houses they'd searched for supplies, and it held a lot of the essentials that sustained the group betweensafehouses. Bill siphoned gas from the truck into the two bottles, and Zoey corked them securely with strips of cloth. She handed one to Louis and one to Bill. Both of them had lighters that they could use if they wanted to throw themolotovs . Francis had spent the previous evening putting together a pipe bomb, which was stable enough to carry by the time they left the suburbanites' basement shelter.

"So, what do you want for Christmas, Bill?" Louis asked quietly as the group moved on a slow pace, using pistol fire against the zombies to avoid setting off car alarms.

"A carton of Craven A's," Said Bill. He stared into space for a moment, daydreaming. "They don't make 'em like they used to, but they're still better than those nastyMarlboros everybody smokes these days." Bill vividly remembered times when if nothing else was going right, he could still smoke as much as he wanted. Now that the world had rearranged itself to an environment he understood again, that was the missing piece of his puzzle. He never had enough cigarettes.

His revelry was interrupted by a zombie's screech. The creature in the car next to him rammed its arm through the front passenger window, reaching for his face. Bill snarled and rammed his rifle butt into the arm, bending it away from his face at an unpleasant angle, andZoey fired one of her pistols from over his shoulder until the creature stopped screaming and twitching. Dark blood ran down the car door from the broken, limp arm. Bill shook his head sharply, took a long drag on his cigarette, and moved on.

"Bill, can you clear these things out, already? I don't want to stand around out here," Zoey said, looking all around herself with every other step.

Bill looked around once or twice himself. "Cover me," he said, and he hauled himself onto the roof of the car that was recently occupied by one of the horde. If the car had an alarm, he decided, it would have gone off before now. After unpleasant trial and error, he'd developed a relatively fool-proof tactic for getting four living humans through large parking lots.

Using his hunting rifle, he lined up a shot at the back windshield of a minivan across the lot and squeezed off a single shot. He watched the window shatter through the scope, and several zombies near it looked up with mild interest. Bill sighed, taking his eye from the scope and scanning the cars again. Behind him, the other three kept up intermittent fire at zombies that were gradually noticing their presence and coming in for a better look like curious sharks. The he saw it. _Ah_, Bill thought, _there she is_. A new, shiny, cherry red Mustang was parked in a handicapped spot ten rows away from him. Smiling, he fired a round the windshield of the car.

This time the shattering glass was accompanied by the whoop! whoop! of a car alarm. An answering, gargling cry rose from the mouths of the infected among the cars, and the humans stood very still as dozens of the undead ran past them, aiming for the wailing Mustang. "Nice shot," Louis commented.

Bill grunted. "Lets move." The humans shot a few stragglers scrambling by and then took off at a run for the mall doors. They all hoped that the doors would be made of something solid and would still lock. The car alarm wouldn't last forever.

Once the alarm went dead, there was a chance that there would be enough collisions among the undead to start a brawl. When the zombies realized that there was something resembling a human next to them they beat and clawed each other as if they really were potential meals. Occasionally they succeeded in taking each other apart. The survivors had seen the bodies of the creatures, skulls crushed and throats and organs torn out like an animal had attacked it, although there didn't seem to be many animals left. The humans could hope.

The car alarm was loud enough to attract zombies from inside the mall as well as out. In front of the four humans, glass doors creaked under the pressure of a horde of zombies leaning against them. The creatures pounded with their moldering fists and stared through the glass with their white, vacant eyes. The survivors skidded to a halt at the curb of the sidewalk as the doors broke apart and zombies poured out, straight down a crosswalk and over the survivors.

Most of the zombies, pale skinned and reeking of grave rot and putrefied food court fare, ran past the survivors on their way to investigate the honking horn and flashing lights across the parking lot. Several, however, ran headlong into the humans, knocking the humans into each other as the creatures slowly realized that there was fresh blood not an arm's length away from their ravenous mouths.

Zoey lost her footing and her head hit the pavement hard. Sparks danced in front of the oncoming zombie rush. The creatures ran right over her and she curled into a ball to protect herself. Then Francis was there, shoving the creatures away from her and hauling her to her feet by the back of her dirty pink sweatshirt. "Shit," Louis said, eyes wide. He stumbled backward and pumped the slide on his shotgun and looked for a safe angle from which he could fire without spraying his friends with buckshot.

Bill narrowed his eyes, drew his sidearm, and began firing into the oncoming rush. Zoey remembered her shotgun and started blasting into the horde as well. Then, abruptly, the rush was past them, aside from a few bodies and one or two shambling wrecks whose bloodZoey splattered across the painted cinder block wall of the building. She stood, panting, shotgun barrel drifting toward the ground, and watched the zombies crawling over the beeping Mustang.

Behind her, Francis was shaking his malfunctioning automatic with a grimace of pure disgust. "God _damn_ this thing," he said. He whacked the weapon against the wall. All four humans ducked as three rounds fired off over their heads.

"Watch it!" Bill shouted around his still-lit cigarette.

Francis shook his head and checked the clip. "Piece of shit," he growled.

"Lets go," Zoey said, walking toward the broken glass doors. "There's got to be something you'd rather shoot in here."

Francis snorted and followed her into the mall. "Yeah. More zombies."


	3. Chapter 3: The Mall

**Chapter 3: The Mall **

The shattered glass doors through which the survivors entered the mall opened onto a food court. Despite the high ceilings, the place still smelled oppressively of food past its prime. There were no zombies among the overturned tables and chairs, much to everyone's relief. Zoey rubbed the growing lump on the back of her head where her skull had hit the sidewalk and sighed, leading the others through the broken glass to look for supplies. Every time they passed up a chance of finding useful resources, they regretted it later.

While the others looked behind counters of fast food restaurants, Francis found a blood-spattered table and an upright chair. He leaned his unreliable Uzi against the chair and spread out the electronics from the smoke detector in the house they'd foraged. He added a pipe bomb from his belt to the pile, and squinted as he attached the electronics to the housing for the explosives. Zombies wouldn't follow the bombs without the beeping and the flashing red light. He was glad that the safety-conscious suburbanites of the world tended to keep active batteries in their smoke detectors. _It pays to be safe_, he thought with a grin. Francis carefully hooked the completed bomb onto his belt where he could get it quickly if he needed it.

Meanwhile, Zoey was crouched behind the counter in a Chinese restaurant with a panda logo on the sign, stuffing her backpack with fortune cookies, packages of rice noodles, bottles of water, and canned vegetables. Francis looked up from his bombmaking to check on the others and saw movement in the kitchen behind her. "Zoey..." Francis called, standing up and bring the barrel of the automatic up with him. The former food court employee was faster. It raced through the kitchen doorway with a garbled wail, plastic-gloved hands reaching for Zoey. She didn't have time to draw her guns so she threw the can of mushrooms she was holding at the creature. The can bounced off the zombie's face and it stumbled back, throwing its arms wide to keep its balance. Francis filled its head and torso with thought the creature's expression looked... surprised? Then the thing collapsed on top of her.

"Oh, yuck!" Zoey shrieked, pinned under the counter by the bleeding zombie body. Its name tag, which was now in front of Zoey's face, read "Mike". The white tile floor was covered with dark blood and Zoey's hands and feet slipped as she tried to get out from underneath the body. Her heart pounded with rising claustrophobia. "A little help?" She shouted. Francis climbed over the counter and pulled the dead teenager off ofZoey, who sprung to her feet, wiping blood from her face.

Zoey stared down at the dead boy, still wearing his red uniform. One of her high school friends got a job in a mall food court after knew the girl was still working there when the outbreak hit. She could be out there right now, skulking around in a dark kitchen, waiting to tear someone's face apart with those fake nails she always used to wear...

Francis looked her over for injuries (he never minded an excuse to do that) and then waved his hand in front of her face. "You ok?" He said. She was pretty enough to keep around. He'd decided that when the three of men had found her in the street near a college campus a few weeks ago. However, he didn't want her foggy-heading around behind him with a shotgun.

Zoey nodded. "I'm alright. Thanks." She paused, looking up at Francis through stray tendrils of brown hair, and then brushed past him to join Bill and Louis, who were already scouting the far end of the food court, where the shops began.

Bill liked the tactical position. They'd entered on the second story, about dead center in a long expanse of stores stretching out of eyesight around a gentle curve in the walls. The glass partitions protecting shoppers from dropping to the floor below were broken in several places. The main shopping area was lit by late afternoon sunlight from skylights, although it was dark inside the shops themselves. That meant that the survivors could conserve their flashlight batteries. Some of the shops were closed off with metal gates, but some looked like they'd been open when the first wave of zombies hit the place. Bill kicked something on the floor, and he looked down to watch a severed arm roll languidly through one of the gaps in the glass barrier and drop to the floor below with a wet thunk. There were more infected inside, then.

Louis consulted a mall directory on a rotating display. "Hey, there's a safehouse in here!" he said, pointing to the figure of a house with a cross inside drawn with red nail polish on the map of the shopping center. The other three stepped closer to look. The location was a bank, according to the map.

"Shit, that means the sporting goods store will be picked clean," Francis grumbled. He stepped away and leaned over the glass railing to take out his frustration on zombies shuffling around on the floor below.

"Maybe, maybe not," Bill said over the gunfire. "We should check anyway. Might be some winter coats in our sizes, and I could use the ammo if there is any."

"Hope they got their Christmas stock in," Louis said. He moved cautiously down the walkway in the direction that the map had indicated that the sporting goods store would be. It was at the eastern end of the mall, and the safehouse was on the bottom floor, but also on the way.

Zoey looked around at the red ribbons and garlands that covered most surfaces of the mall as they went. "Bet they do," she commented. She paused to fire four rapid shots into each of two zombies inside a demolished clothing store. "Could one of you get me a solar powered generator for Christmas? That'd be sweet." Zoey longed for just a few hours in front of a TV, playing a good move. Not a Romero classic, though. Maybe a comedy, or even a Christmas special. It'd take a lot to convince her that it's a wonderful life, but a bit of pleasant unreality couldn't hurt. It would remind her of Christmas with her parents back home.

"I say we hit the store, sleep in the safehouse tonight, and then start north in the morning," Louis said while he loaded more shells into his shotgun.

"That works," Zoey agreed.

"Why wait? It's not getting any warmer up north," Francis said.

"One day won't make that much of a difference," Louis said. "One more decent night's sleep and I think I can handle almost anything." Bill grunted in agreement with that. Christmas day had always been a good day to sleep in. Everybody else was always "spending time with their families" then, instead of doing useful things like keeping the bars open or accepting day labor applications.

Ahead, the path was blocked by a makeshift barricade of display tables and shelving. Someone had tried to make a stand here, and judging by the quantity of blood they had not succeeded. "Double back to the escalator," Bill ordered. The group was just reaching the bottom of the stationary escalator when a quivering sob reached their ears. Everyone froze. "Witch," Bill whispered.

All four of them craned their necks, looking for the threat. "Does anybody see her?" Zoey hissed. Her head throbbed and her heart pounded.

Louis felt the same creeping fear. "I think she's on the other side of the escalator," he whispered back.

"Just walk straight ahead, slowly," Bill said. He pulled his rifle off his back and left the bottom step of the escalator, walking warily toward an overturned cart full of cell phone accessories. A zombie ran at him from the side and Bill pegged it expertly with a single rifle blast.

Instantly the weeping ceased as if someone had hit a mute button on a remote control. A rattling, furious growl replaced it. "That witch is _not_ happy," Zoey whispered, backing slowly up the escalator. Bill stopped mid-step. He looked back at the others with the dread of a man in a minefield.

"Where is she?" Louis said quietly, following Zoey up the escalator. Francis, at the bottom of the stairs in his heavy booted feet, didn't move a muscle for fear he'd attract the witch's attention.

After a long moment, the weeping resumed. Bill took a shaky drag on his cigarette. From the top of the escalator, Zoey spotted the danger. "Bill, she is right behind that cart. She's holding something," Zoey called down to him as softly as she could.

Bill nodded and took another long drag. Watching the floor to make sure he didn't step on anything that would flash or make noise, Bill crept to the right wall and through the open doorway of a soap and lotion store. Two zombies were inside and Bill walked the length of the store quickly before strapping the rifle to his back again and shooting them with his sidearm. The heartbroken sobbing continued, the sound reverberating along the empty corridor of the shopping mall with the intensity of utter hopelessness.

Bill stepped across the doorway of the store again and eased along the wall, taking care not to look at the miserable creature behind him. The other zombies could barely tell when you were near them, let alone when you could see them, but some of the more evolved ones seemed to have the capacity to feel watched. The witches, in Bill's experience, were especially shy.

When he was far enough down the corridor that he thought he wouldn't disturb the creature, he turned and motioned with a hand for the others to follow his path. Still using his pistol, he shot several more of he undead that hovered around the nearby stores. One of the shops sold toys, and he watched that one especially closely.

Louis, Francis, and Zoey were now making their way down the escalator and into the lotion store. Despite the potential doom crouching only a few steps away, Zoey paused to select a few bottles from the shelves and add them to her backpack stash. Louis was thinking about another matter, however. While Zoey and Francis were hugging the wall to pass, Louis looked at the witch.

He'd never seen a crying one this close before. The creature was on her knees, her skin so pale gray it was nearly white, and her eyes were squeezed shut in misery. The torn remains of a green dress covered some of her skin but much was left bare, exposing the gaunt frame of a concentration camp victim underneath.

In her arms, the witch cradled the upper half of a little girl's body.

Louis cringed and took an involuntary step back. He slammed into a display of Christmas and Hanukkah gift baskets and the display table rocked, dumping its contents to the floor with a series of crashes and cracks. The sharp smell of artificial evergreen and peppermint filled the small store. The witch's eyes snapped open and met Louis's.

The eyes in the emaciated sockets burned orange, far different from those of other infected. There was more than that in those eyes though, Louis saw. His hackles rose. The witch knew, unlike any of the other infected former humans, what she had lost. It wasn't just her mind, her life or even her daughter. This creature had lost everything she'd ever known, ever wanted, ever loved... and Louis had just broken her last possession: silence.

The witch and Louis moved at the same instant. The witch rose to her feet with haunting grace, leaving the oozing body of the child sprawled on the floor, and Louis leapt for the chain that controlled the sliding metal door designed to prevent after-hours robbery. Louis threw all of his weight onto the chain, and the metal grating slammed down just in front of the screaming, enraged witch. "Guys, help!" Louis screamed, dropping his shotgun and wrapping the chain around both hands to keep the door closed. The witch's bony fingers clutched at the bars of the metal door and began tearing it apart. The witch shrieked wildly and her eyes never lost focus on Louis.

Bill, Zoey, and Francis started firing then. The witch didn't even look at them as bullet after bullet pierced her dead, white body. At last one of Zoey's shots caught the her from the side, blasting away arm, chest, and her lower jaw. Dark blood dripped from her half mouth and her cries quieted to a high whine. She dropped to her hands and knees, turned, and crawled the short distance back to the dead child. She died there, as she probably had once before, with the child in her arms. It took the others almost half an hour to convince Louis to open the door and pick up his shotgun again.

On his way out of the store, he looked Bill in the eyes. "They're getting smarter," he said. He moved off at a quick pace when he saw the safehouse symbol painted on a wall, and the others ran to keep up, shooting zombies that Louis missed along the way. The safehouse itself was inside a branch of Jericho Savings and Trust. Louis slammed the bank vault door from the inside almost before the last survivor was through. "Fuck that," he said, "we'll go to the store in the morning."

* * *

**Author's note: **Now rated T for language and violence! Next chapter we find out how survivors of the zombie apocalypse spend a typical night, and what their plan is for the future.


	4. Chapter 4: The Vault

**Chapter 4: The Vault**

The inside of the bank vault was complete blackness without electricity for overhead lights. Bill flicked on his trusty lighter, shining quavering yellow light over the four tired faces of the survivors and the cramped interior of the vault. Louis spotted a hand cranking flashlight on a shelf. "Hey, I bet this is from that outdoors store," he said, winding the crank. In a moment the flashlight glowed brightly enough for Bill to return his lighter to his pocket.

Francis leaned back against the solid vault door while Bill, Louis, and Zoey settled down along the wire shelving on the walls. Zoey picked up a stack of fifty dollar bills that someone had left there and chuckled. "Easy money," she said.

"Save a few of those, they make good fire accelerate," Bill commented, stubbing out his cigarette on the cement floor. He saw that the available wall space had already been used by other survivors with speculation they'd already heard, and other survivors had started writing on the floor with permanent marker. Nearby cities were overrun, Kara and Todd were looking for Megan, Larry, and Trish, the zombies were changing and developing nasty new ways to kill people, infected burn like kindling, there was supposed to be an ice stronghold of healthy humans in Canada... Bill sighed. Sometimes being well informed got old.

"Hey Zoey, we got anything worth eating?" Francis asked.

Zoey opened her bloodstained Jansport and rummaged through the contents. "We've got Spam, baked beans, canned fruits, canned veggies, condensed milk, more beans..." She dug some more, tilting her bag to catch the light from the flashlight which Louis had propped up in the center of the vault. "And canned asparagus, and fortune cookies," she finished.

Francis groaned. "Same shit. I'll take the Spam," he added. All the running and shooting had worked up his appetite.

"This stuff is heavy," Zoey said, tossing Francis the canned meat and a plastic bottle of water. "You carry this thing, you pick the food."

"And give hunters a little handle to grab me with? No thanks," Francis said with a snort. "Besides, you're better at finding this stuff."

Louis accepted a can of asparagus from Zoey. He really didn't mind the canned veggies, much to the others' disbelief. "We ought to," he said gallantly. "Bet that store has backpacks, too."

"Will you quit talking about that place like it's going to be heaven on Earth?" Bill said, his gravelly voice dulled in the small room. "Anyone who's ever heard of this place and survived will have been there first, so don't get your hopes up too high. Besides, we've still got a walk through this mall, and nobody's cleared out the walking dead in weeks, by the number of them."

"They don't always clear them out," Louis said, accepting a can opener from Zoey, who had just opened one of the containers of beans. Nobody was going to eat all of their "meals" that night. They'd hang onto most of the food to make a breakfast in the morning. "Some of them just sneak by."

"Exactly, more for us," Bill said. "It isn't going to be easy, getting there. There's no guarantee there'll be anything great waiting for us when we get there. I just want you all to be prepared."

Francis laughed. "Story of our lives," he said. The four ate in silence for several minutes, but all too soon they'd finished the minimal amount that they would eat for the night.

Zoey tossed each survivor a fortune cookie, then cracked open her own. "The man who turns to face the sun misses a thousand shadows?" She read aloud around the half of the cookie she'd already started chewing. "I can't tell if that's a good thing or not."

"Mine says 'Today you have many friends," Francis said, raising an eyebrow at the slip of paper. "Many dead friends, maybe."

"From great wealth comes great misfortune," Louis read. "There's a song about that, you know."

Zoey laughed at that. "These aren't really fortunes," She commented. "They're more like Confucianism cookies."

"I dunno, they seem pretty straight forward to me," Francis said, looking at his fortune again and shrugging.

Zoey rolled her eyes. "What does yours say, Bill?"

"How to say 'fish' in Chinese," he said, crumpling the paper and chucking it over his shoulder. It landed on a shelf top and skittered into the dark.

"So how do you say it?" Louis asked.

"I don't speak that shit," Bill said derisively.

"Could you pass me that marker then?" Louis asked. Bill looked, saw the marker by his left boot, and tossed it to Louis. Louis caught it and wrote the same thing he wrote in his neat script every safehouse: "Selina and Rachelle, we're going north. - Louis" That was his sister and his niece. He had looked for them in the apartment complex where they both lived once people started realizing that staying holed up in homes wasn't safe anymore. He never found them. He hadn't given up hope that they were alive.

"So here's the battle plan as I see it," Bill said, lighting a new cigarette. "We'll hit this store, get what we can, and head north along the highway. Not _on_ the highway. There will be too many of hostiles. We need supplies, there are a hundred little towns on the way. I think we should avoid New York if we can, too. Just go straight on up to Toronto. That's where the holdouts are supposed to be, right?"

Zoey pointed to a spot on the wall near the door. "That's what they said right there: 'There are living people in Toronto.'" I wonder how they know?"

Francis laughed. "They don't _know _anything. They're just repeating what they heard."

He looked up as something thumped against the vault door. Just on the other side, a menacing growl and pacing footsteps gave away the identity of their guest. "That's a hunter," Bill said.

"Great, he's going to be there all night," Francis groaned. He thumped the door with a fist. "Go away!" As if in response, the hunter outside screamed and started scratching at the metal ineffectually.

"So much for sugarplums dancing in our heads," Louis sighed, leaning back against the shelving units as the hunter continued to scream.

Zoey stood, taking the safety off of her shotgun and pumping the slide. "Might as well kill it now before it brings friends," she said grimly.

"I'll open the door, you shoot it," Francis said. Zoey nodded, and Francis pulled the heavy bolt on the door and opened it half a foot, bracing his foot against the wall to give him the leverage to keep the door partially closed.

The hunter immediately crammed its head, an arm, and most of its torso through the door, howling its annoyance at the impediment. This one was young, in one of the black hoodies with a silver skull sold by a pop goth store that probably had an establishment somewhere in the mall. It raked Zoey across the shin with its claws before she turned its skull into a pulpy mess with a shotgun blast. She kicked the body out of the door and Francis closed it and latched it. Cursing, Zoey sat down again to examine her leg.

"That's not too bad," Bill said, moving the flashlight for a better look. "See if there are any bandages around here."

Louis looked at the contents of the shelves. Beside a bit of discarded money and some rolled up blankets he found a first aid kit. He opened it. There was one large stick-on bandage and a nearly-empty roll of gauze, but that was all. He passed these to Bill, who helped Zoey clean herself up. "You still got that deck of cards, kid?" Bill asked.

"Yeah," she said, biting her lip when Bill tightened the gauze around her leg. She pulled the cards from a front pocket of her backpack. "Texas holdem?"

"Sure," Bill said, and the others settled down on the floor as Zoey dealt the cards. "Whoever loses the most carries the backpack tomorrow when we get the hell out of this place."

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**Author's Notes:** Thank you for the nice reviews! Next chapter: The grand finale! Will the sporting goods store be the stuff that survivors' dreams are made of? It's just a walk in the mall. Surely nothing could go wrong ;)


	5. Chapter 5: The Store

**Chapter 5: The Store**

Constantly fighting for life is an exhausting pursuit. Judging the vault's thick metal door sufficient protection from the infected, the survivors didn't set a watch as they usually did. They were awakened by two more hunters, inexplicably drawn to them from elsewhere in the mall. Louis proposed that they'd learned that the safehouse was a good place to find a meal. Francis put down one to keep its screaming from attracting other zombies. The last only paced outside and growled. The survivors woke at the first sound of scratching on the door, but they slept again. Deadly peril would wait until morning.

When the four woke again hours later and sleepily shoveled canned food into their mouths, the snarling presence outside was still waiting. "Do you figure they stare at walls like the other vampires when they can't stare at a door with people behind it?" Francis said around a mouthful of Spam.

"Zombies, god damn it," Louis sighed. "They're still zombies."

"Merry Christmas to you too," Francis said. "Hurry it up. I've got to take a leak and I'm not taking that hunter out by myself."

"Oh yeah, merry Christmas, people!" Louis said more cheerfully. Zoey returned his greeting. Bill grunted and pulled himself to his feet using the shelves on the walls.

The group took a few moments to reorganize the safehouse before they left, folding up blankets and collecting Bill's cigarette butts. Francis, loser of last night's poker game, hefted the backpack of supplies with minimal grumbling. He held the door partially closed while Louis and Zoey shot the hunter outside with coordinated shotgun blasts, and the group stepped out of the vault and made their way back to the bathrooms near the food court. Their second trip along the length of the mall was less eventful by far, as the previous denizens of the place were now in pieces on the floor.

In the beginning, Louis had tried to bury the bodies. After being attacked twice by zombies drawn by the sound of shoveling dirt, he gave up on burial and covered them with whatever he could find. Now there were simply too many. If he tried to show all of the dead some respect, even after they'd recently attempted to gnaw on his face, he wouldn't have time to do anything else. Bill, Zoey, and Francis had more basic priorities. Louis tried not to step on the bodies along their route. That would have to be enough.

"Look, there it is!" Zoey said excitedly from the front of the group, breaking Louis out of his reverie. Ahead, a red and brown sign for Gander and Buck hung above a wide entrance to the survivor's destination. One of the former employees, still wearing the brown outdoorsy uniform, ran at them as they moved in, and five pistol shots echoed through the empty stores as the survivors shot the zombie and kept on walking.

"Now don't split up," Bill warned as he followed Louis through a selection of boots on the first floor of the store. All four wrinkled their noses at the odor of decay that permeated the place.

"I'll watch your back," Francis said to Zoey. He grinned, but he knew it came off as more of a leer.

"Sure," she said, her expression a mixture of amusement and distaste that Francis was accustomed to. "Let's find the guns."

The two moved cautiously around the store. The place looked more like a war zone than most of the abandoned shops they'd explored since the outbreak. There were decomposing bodies scattered among the clothing racks and over displays, causing the unpleasant smell the survivors had noticed when they walked in. On the way, Zoey grabbed a pair of gloves in her size and tossed a larger pair to Francis. "It's going to be cold in Canada," she said.

"It's cold here," Francis said. "Look, it's snowing," he added, pointing out a broken window to the parking lot. Sure enough, a drift of white was falling through the window.

"What do you know; a white Christmas!" Zoey said, smiling. Francis liked that look on her. It made her look less... hunted. Zoey tossed two more pairs of gloves to Francis and walked on. "Put those in the bag for Bill and Louis."

The gun counter ahead really did look like heaven to Francis. There were still nearly a dozen handguns on display. Someone had blown open a locked case against the back wall, which Francis and Zoey made a beeline for.

"Oh yeah," Francis said. On the floor near the case was submachine gun, shining in the morning light from the broken window like the cover shot of Guns and Ammo magazine. "Hello, M16A3," Francis crooned, lifting the weapon as he would an abandoned infant. "How could someone just leave this beauty here?" Francis marvelled. He gently wiped the barrel clean of dried blood with his new pair of gloves.

"I don't think they did it on purpose," Zoey said, surveying the wreckage around them with a crawling sensation of danger. There was a _lot_ of blood sprayed across the firearms department, she now saw. She couldn't tell if it had belonged to infected or healthy humans when it was shed. Most of the bodies on the floor and the clothes racks seemed to have been heading toward the spot where she stood when they met their end.

"Hey Zoey, check this out," Francis said. He'd carefully propped Anna against the counter, replacing her with his new submachine gun, and was holding another weapon out to Zoey. "This is a semi-automatic shotgun. You don't have to pump it after every shot. You'll like it," he said. He set about collected boxes of bullets and shotgun shells for the backpack while Zoey examined her new acquisition.

"Thanks," she said quietly, absorbed in locating the safety switch. The power of the new gun was enough to distract Zoey from her previous train of thought.

Bill and Louis found the stairs and were now examining camping gear. Louis looked out the second floor window, down to the snowy sidewalk below. "Hey, look at those ATVs!" he said, pointing them out to Bill. "I bet we could get those going if we siphoned enough gas for them. And found the keys," he added.

Bill was intrigued, and always looking for an opportunity to give his aching knee a rest. "I bet the keys are convenient. Might even be gas. People got to test drive those things, right?"

"Let's take a look," Louis suggested.

Outside, the two of them shot a few zombie stragglers and examine the machines. Louis found a rack of keys and Bill checked the gas. "They're all almost empty," he said. "Guess they didn't want people driving far in them. I'll start filling them up." He laughed as he pulled the plastic tubing from his pocket and got to work on the project. "Who would have thought?"

"I think they call that a Christmas miracle," Louis said, laughing too. Then an alarm bell from rang out from inside the store. Louis and Bill exchanged wide-eyed looks of horror. "Keep filling those up," Louis shouted over his shoulder as he ran back through the store.

Still at the gun counter, Francis and Zoey were frantically peering under counters and along walls, looking for a shut-off switch. "What the hell is that?" Louis shouted over the noise.

"This case was still closed up, so I broke the latch. It thought I was stealing," Francis yelled back, waving his hand at a large gun safe hanging open nearby.

A howling, moaning cry of many voices echoed through the empty store to the humans, sending shivers up their spines. "They're coming," Zoey moaned, her eyes huge, her knuckles white as she gripped her gun. She looked down at the large red stain on the tile floor under her feet. This was what had happened to whoever left Francis's new gun, she realized.

"Look, Bill found some ATVs outside," Louis said. "He's putting gas in them right now. We can get out of here-" At that moment, a green blur shot down from the floor above and wrapped itself around Louis's arms and chest. He had no time to shout for help before he was lifted off his feet and toward the wall.

"Smoker!" Francis roared as Louis swung by him on a fleshy, green tongue. Louis slammed into the wall. Zoey ran to grab him before he got too far off of the floor. The tongue trailed over the edge of the railing above and into the darkened second floor. Zoey couldn't see the creature holding Francis.

Francis leaned over the counter and opened up with his new gun as a wall of slavering zombies ran through the mall entrance and in between racks of clothes and fishing supplies on the ground floor. His new weapon mowed down zombies and clothes racks with ease. "That's more like it!" He growled, a grin on his face despite the horde before him. Rifle fire resounded from the parking lot outside.

Behind Francis, Zoey tore open a package containing an enormous knife for carving up hunting trophies. She climbed onto a countertop to reach the dripping green tongue that was wrapped around Louis. She hacked at it over and over until it tore in two under Louis's weight. He hit the floor heavily, coughing and gasping for breath. Zoey leapt down next to him to grab her gun. By the time she'd turned around again, the upper half of the smoker's tongue, and presumably its owner, was already gone. "Shit," Zoey said, catching Louis's hand and pulling him to his feet.

Louis picked up an auto shotgun of his own from the open locker. "I'm going to check on Bill and out tickets out of here. Cover me!" He yelled over Francis's gunfire. Louis ran for the door to the parking lot, and Zoey shot zombies trying to chase him down.

Her new gun kicked against her shoulder and she knew she'd be sore if she made it out of this mess alive. Its zombie-stopping power was well worth the trouble, however. Every few second she looked over her shoulder, searching for the smoker. _It's stalking us, _Zoey thought, her skin prickling as she loaded shells from a fresh box.

A few moments later, the flood of zombies pouring through the doors slowed to just a few slower, more decayed creatures, which Francis and Zoey easily picked off. Francis reloaded his gun, his eyes gleaming and a smile playing upon his usually dark features. "I _love_ this thing!" He said happily. The smoker's cough echoed form the second floor in the sudden silence, and Francis sent a hail of bullets to the second story. He was rewarded with a phlegmy shriek and a cloud of noxious green smoke from the floor above. "Love it," Francis repeated, patting the gun. A sound like a herd of charging elephants drew his attention to the mall entrance again. "No problem today, zombies," he said with as close as he came to Christmas cheer. He felt ready for anything.

Anything, that was, other than a ten foot, muscle-bound monstrosity with the remains of a Santa suit still clinging to parts of its ape-like frame. The creature roared and crashed through the racks of clothes, heading straight for the survivors.

"Zoey!" Francis yelled, vaulting over the counter and toward the parking lot door. "Tank!"

Zoey had already seen it from her position on a countertop. She pulled a lighter from the pocket of her jeans, dropped her shotgun on the counter, and in one smooth motion lit the molotov from her belt and threw it into the racks of clothes in front of the abominably huge zombie. "Run like hell!" She screamed as the clothes and the tank were both set ablaze in the ensuing conflagration. Francis did not need to be told twice.

When the two burst through the broken plate glass window to the parking lot, Bill saw immediately that there was trouble. Louis had been shooting zombies while Bill fueled the ATVs in the lot. "I've got one more left, keep them busy!" He told the other three.

"It's not a horde. It's just one big fucker," Francis replied without stopping. He ran along the wall of the building, firing wildly through windows when he could. He thought he was doing pretty well as a distraction, until a kayak sailed through a window and slammed into him with unexpected force. Francis hit the pavement and skidded halfway across the street on his back with the kayak on top of him. He gasped for breath, trying to recover the win that had been knocked out of him. He watched the muscular inferno with a Santa hat still on its tiny head climb through the store window.

"Over here, you freak!" Louis yelled. As the tank hauled itself through the window, intent on crushing the life out of Francis, Louis ran in close and started pumping it full of shot with automatic fire. The creature absorbed three close range blasts from the shotgun before it even took its eyes off of Francis. By the fourth automatic shotgun blast, Louis realized that he was way too close to the monster. Sometime between the fourth shot and the fifth, the tank's enormous fist connected with Louis's ribcage. One of the ATVs stopped Louis's flight, and he cried out in pain as his spine bent backward over the vehicle. Louis rolled off of it and started running in the opposite direction of the blazing tank and Francis. Behind him, the earsplitting roar of the enraged zombie Santa told him that the tank was still enthusiastic about grinding him into the pavement.

Meanwhile, Bill was starting up the ATVs he could safely reach without coming too near the tank. Zoey shoved the kayak off of Francis. "How do you feel?" She asked as she helped him up.

"Like I got run over by a goddamn boat, that's how I feel!" Francis snarled. He pulled his gun out from under a car and stalked off after the tank, which was chasing Louis through the parking lot.

"Guys? What are you doing? Help!" Louis shouted, slipping between two sedans as he ran from the tank. The tank put one meaty hand on each of the cars and shoved. The tires screeched as the cars skidded along the pavement, hitting other vehicles as the tank cleared itself a path. The red hat on its head was on fire.

Francis caught up with the tank and let the submachine gun fire flow. The tank roared as a stream of bullets poured into its back. Francis's fire hit the monster between its enormous shoulder blades, a few penetrating far enough to reach the creature's skull. Thoroughly distracted by this new assault, the tank turned away from Louis and lumbered toward Francis, drooling and gnashing its grungy teeth around its lolling tongue.

Francis didn't move. He held down the trigger on his new gun and sprayed bullets directly into the giant zombie's face, a wicked grin splitting his own. He laughed along with the rattling automatic fire. The tank, blood dripping from the wreckage of its already unpleasant face, slowed its charge. It stumbled. It swung an arm at Francis, slowly, as if it were caught in a tar pit. It collapsed forward onto the pavement, the mountainous body quaking in its death throes. Francis kept firing and laughing until his clip was empty. Oh yes, he loved his new gun. "Merry Christmas, mother fucker," Francis said gleefully to the enormous pile of rotting flesh at his feet.

Behind him, the engines of three ATVs rumbled as Bill, Zoey, and Louis rolled up, ready to go. Francis went back to get on a vehicle of his own. He gunned the engine. A car alarm on the BMW to his left went off like a tornado siren.

"Let's move, people!" Bill bellowed over the racket as the answering screams of roused infected rent the air. The survivors rode away through the parking lot, shooting zombies with their pistols when they got too close. As snow fell from the gray winter sky, the survivors turned north and drove away from the gathering zombie horde.

**The End**

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**Author's Note:** Now that I'm done writing I'll start responding to your reviews. Thank you for reading! Merry Christmas and happy 2009!


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